Bob Fuchigami was one of eight children of Japanese parents growing up in Yuba City, Calif., in 1942, when the family received notice that they had six days to dispose of their property and report to a train station for transport to an internment camp
“They just told us to get rid of everything except for certain items. I didn’t learn where we were going,” he said Sunday at a Day of Remembrance in Denver.
The commemoration of the 75th anniversary of President Franklin Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066, drew hundreds of people to History Colorado Center.
The order, signed two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, gave the U.S. military broad powers to designate exclusion zones, remove anyone of Japanese heritage from their homes and place them in one of 10 American concentration camps.
Almost 120,000 people from the West Coast were relocated to camps in the country’s interior. Fuchigami and his family were moved to Camp Amache in Southeast Colorado, where about 9,000 people spent the war years.
It was fear that some might engage in espionage and aid an invasion of the U.S. mainland that led to their transport to the camps. “I didn’t know where Pearl Harbor was,” Fuchigami, now 86, said. “It was terrible for my brothers and sisters and parents because they had to deal with the problem of what are we going to do with our property.”
At Camp Amache, near the farming community of Granada, the family was housed in barracks separated into rooms. The 10 of them were squeezed into two of the small rooms. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire, and armed military police kept watch from guard towers. “There was always that reminder that you had lost your freedom.”
In 1983, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians concluded that those who had been locked up posed no threat, and that there was no military necessity for the internment.
The commission determined that racial bias, rather than on any true threat to national security, led to the internment, according to Sites of Shame, a National Park Service website, with information on the camps.
In fact, during World War II, no Japanese-American in the U.S., Hawaii or Alaska, citizen or immigrant, was ever convicted of espionage or sabotage.
Rose Tanaka, 90, and her family were sent to Manzanar, a camp in California. “The American government just wanted to intimidate our people,” she told the crowd of several hundred that attended the presentation at the History Colorado Center.
She was 15 when she arrived at the camp and graduated from high school while she was there. “The camp itself was taken care of by civilians, and they knew we weren’t dangerous.”
Attendees also heard a presentation by Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, a professor in the department of Asian American Studies at UCLA, who has researched the post-war resettlement of Japanese-Americans, particularly in Colorado.
The incarcerations resulted in trauma to those who were rounded up and could have had an impact on their descendents, Hirabayashi said. “There may have been multigenerational impacts.”
The imprisonment of so many based on their ethnicity should be cause for reflection at a time when many Americans fear Muslim refugees coming into the country, Hirabayashi said. “We need to reflect on this. How can we, as Americans, assure our security without panicking and without damaging the rights of others?”
